The late scholastics, writing in the Baroque and Early Modern periods, discussed a wide variety of moral questions relating to political life in times of both peace and war. Is it ever permissible to bribe voters? Can tax evasion be morally justified? What are the moral duties of artists? Is it acceptable to fight in a war one believes to be unjust? May we surrender innocents to the enemy if it is necessary to save the state? These questions are (...) no less relevant for philosophers and politicians today than they were for late scholastic thinkers. By bringing into play the opinions and arguments of numerous authors, many of them little known or entirely forgotten, this book is the first to provide an in-depth treatment of the dynamic and controversial nature of late scholastic applied moral thinking which demonstrates its richness and diversity. (shrink)

This study endeavors to investigate the theory of the value of money from the vantage point of late scholastic scholars, with a specific focus on the Salamanca School and the two prevailing monetary doctrines: Objectivism (Metallism) and Subjectivism (Chartalism). Our investigation employs the classical works of late scholastic thinkers from the 15th to the 17th centuries to illuminate the perspectives held by the Salamanca School concerning monetary value. The findings affirm that the twofold theory of (...) money value proposed by late scholastic thinkers constitutes a nuanced iteration of the multidimensional approach to money. This comprehensive framework encompasses various facets of value, such as the final, actual, formal, and material dimensions. Moreover, the conspicuous emphasis placed by late scholastic thinkers on the subjective aspects of money value imparts a multifaceted character to their theory, demonstrating striking parallels with modern subjective doctrine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes and the Last ScholasticsBlake D. DuttonRoger Ariew. Descartes and the Last Scholastics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 230. Cloth, $42.50.The attempt to understand Descartes vis-à-vis the scholastic tradition dates back to the studies of Etienne Gilson early in this century. Though Descartes saw himself as a revolutionary who would overthrow the Aristotelianism entrenched in the universities, Gilson was able to demonstrate his reliance (...) upon a variety of scholastic sources for important terminology, distinctions, and arguments which permeate his writings. Unfortunately, this line of investigation was largely ignored among Anglo-American scholars who were generally hostile to Scholasticism and uninterested in contextualizing Descartes's thought. However, since the mid-eighties there has been a distinct shift in attitude as scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the place of Scholasticism within Descartes's intellectual environment. Among these, Roger Ariew has to be counted as one of the most sophisticated, and his new book, Descartes and the Late Scholastics, marks an important contribution to the growing literature on the topic.Ariew's book is actually a collection of essays published over the last decade, including two which he co-authored with Marjorie Grene. Many of these have been substantially expanded to include fresh material and reworked so as to give the whole a greater sense of continuity. After a marvelous opening chapter in which he lays out his overall account of Descartes's attitude towards Scholasticism, Ariew presents the remaining essays in two large groups: those dealing with the immediate context of Descartes's thought and those dealing with its reception through the early part of the eighteenth century.Among the more interesting results of the first group of studies is Ariew's claim that the scholastic climate in and around Paris during Descartes's lifetime was predominately Scotistic rather than Thomistic. He shows this by looking at positions taken by a number of Parisian schoolmen on important issues which typically divided Scotists and Thomists. Ariew goes on to argue that not only was the Parisian environment Scotistic, but that Descartes aligned himself with the Scotists on many key issues in both physics (e.g., that time is independent of motion) and metaphysics (e.g., that the principle of individuation is a form). This is certainly an intriguing claim since most studies of this type have viewed Descartes in relation to Aquinas and those Jesuit thinkers who were broadly Thomistic in outlook. In bringing to light this Scotistic background, Ariew has opened up an important new line of inquiry.Other topics included in this first section are the literary and philosophical background [End Page 275] to the "new way of ideas" of which Descartes is a founder, the place of Descartes's doctrine of matter and form in seventeenth century debates over hylomorphism, and the reaction of Scholastics to the observational results of the new astronomy. What emerges in these essays is not only a highly nuanced view of Descartes's relation to Scholasticism, but an important corrective to still prevalent views of the Scholastics as reactionary and blindly opposed to developments within the new science. This last point is made with particular force in the fifth essay entitled "Scholastics and the New Astronomy." There Ariew argues that the astronomical observations of Galileo et alia were not in themselves decisive for overthrowing the Aristotelian cosmology as it had been articulated in the seventeenth century. This is because scholastic astronomers were generally accepting of such findings (e.g., sunspots) and were able to accommodate them within their own systems by making relatively minor adjustments. Although these systems ultimately proved themselves inadequate, Ariew makes a strong case that the Aristotelianism of the seventeenth century was sufficiently fluid to accommodate most of what the astronomers offered up. Thus the necessity for a radical overhaul of basic philosophical and scientific assumptions was by no means as evident as standard histories of this period would have us believe.The second section of the book is dedicated to debates over Cartesianism and its fate in the generations immediately following Descartes's death. Here Ariew provides a wealth of detail about various condemnations of Cartesianism, a comparative study of... (shrink)

This is the first book-length study of Descartes's metaphysics to place it in its immediate historical context, the Late Scholastic philosophy of thinkers such as Suárez against which Descartes reacted. Jorge Secada views Cartesian philosophy as an 'essentialist' reply to the 'existentialism' of the School, and his discussion includes careful analyses and original interpretations of such central Cartesian themes as the role of scepticism, intentionality and the doctrine of the material falsity of ideas, universals and the relation (...) between sense and understanding, causation and the proofs of the existence of God, the theory of substance, and the dualism of mind and matter. His study offers a picture of Descartes's metaphysics that is both novel and philosophically illuminating. (shrink)

Deborah J. Brown - Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.1 173-175 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Deborah Brown University of Queensland Gary Steiner. Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism. JHP Book Series. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004. Pp. 352. Cloth, $60.00. This work takes as its starting point the need to ground Descartes's moral philosophy in something more fundamental (...) than human reason. Finding inspiration in Heidegger's lament, "In what soil do the roots of tree of philosophy find their support?" , Steiner proceeds to ground the "concrete content and absolute authority" of Descartes's moral principles in his Christian faith . This is a book with a mission: to keep the secularizing readers of Descartes's philosophy from the Church door. It stands as an important reminder that in understanding Descartes we cannot ignore his theology and achieves this goal in a lucid and erudite fashion. But the central tenet of the book—that Descartes subordinated much of his thinking about morals to the authority of religion—is, in my view, fundamentally mistaken. Steiner's Descartes is the pivotal transitional figure between the orthodox Christianity of the late scholastic period and the secular modernism of.. (shrink)

This article explores the diversity of the European idea of peace in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In the late Middle Ages, a literary genre of “peace writings” emerged. Despite the ubiquitous academic interest in peace, however, late medieval scholastic conceptions of peace have hitherto escaped serious scholarly investigation. Drawing on Johan Galtung's classic typology of the idea of peace, this essay offers an examination of the discussions of Thomas Aquinas, Remigio de’ Girolami, and (...) Dante on peace, which not only illustrates the diversity of late medieval visions of peace but also argues that late medieval thinkers shared the recognition that temporal peace was possible: a significant departure from the Christian skepticism of this-worldly peace. (shrink)

Medieval theology is, at times, still conventionally identified with systematic thought as exemplified by the works of scholastic thinkers such as the Franciscan friar, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, and the Dominican, Thomas Aquinas. However, this was not the only form of medieval theology. Influential studies have established that monastic theology can be treated as an older partner of scholasticism.1 An increasing number of scholars are adopting the concept of vernacular theology as a third theological tradition from medieval Christianity.2This essay (...) considers vernacular theology, with examples from late medieval Italy, and its relationship to a concept of translation.3 Reflections are drawn.. (shrink)

This review note surveys some important aspects of a recent publication by Amos Edelheit, A Philosopher at the Crossroads: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Scholastic Philosophy. While focus over the last decades has been placed on Pico’s thought in relation to Jewish Kabbalah and mysticism, Edelheit hopes to emphasize the importance of the scholastic tradition (or, rather, the pluriform and various tradition of late medieval and Renaissance scholasticism) in Pico’s thought, and the ways in which this (...) intellectual context places this unique Renaissance thinker at a sort of ‘crossroads’. Beyond providing a brief overview of the three main parts of the text, this note examines more closely Edelheit’s study of Pico’s 900 Theses and the methodological approach which involves a reconstruction of the dialectical context for each thesis. The Latin scholastics are real conversational partners for Pico: he is versed in the 13th-century scholastic sources, is certainly familiar with contemporaneous scholastic thought, and is able to employ scholastic methods and terminology within his wider philosophical project. While scholastic philosophy was very much alive at the end of the fifteenth century, Pico’s new and inclusive approach to philosophy and the history of philosophy, never eschewing the Latin masters, departs from both scholastic and humanist trends. (shrink)

The Italian-born Lanfranc of Pavia and his more illustrious pupil and compatriot Anselm of Bec have long been considered pivotal figures in the theological and especially philosophical developments of the late eleventh century. Long ago dubbed the “father of Scholasticism” on account of his attempts to harmonize reason and faith, Anselm has occasioned increasing scrutiny in recent years as scholars have begun to target the cultural and pedagogical role of Anselm and his milieu in the early stages of the (...) twelfth-century renaissance. In a particularly stimulating interdisciplinary exploration of the cognitive relation between builders and their craft and masters and theirs, Charles M. Radding and William W. Clark have advanced an intriguing model suggesting that theologians and Romanesque builders of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were part of a larger transformative development in which thinkers and artisans developed new methods for solving new problems; these new methods, in turn, transformed practitioners of a craft into members of new and distinct disciplines. The verdict is still out on the precise nature of those important developments, but especially vexing is the question of the abbey of Bec's importance and influence under Lanfranc and Anselm during these changing times. As a leading scholar of Anselm has recently put it, “The character of the school of Bec emerges as a riddle to be solved. What was its focus, what did its teachers teach, and how long did it last?” Recent studies have modified Richard Southern's portrayal of the curriculum of Anselm's school at Bec as largely devoted to monastic ideals and demonstrated that history and law were also studied, that a good number of students went on to become able administrators, and that Anselm may have unwittingly contributed to the rise of courtly love. Much of the fog surrounding the authorial publication and dissemination of Anselm's writings has recently been cleared by Richard Sharpe's meticulous analysis in “Anselm as Author,” revealing a careful and more deliberate editorial planning on Anselm's part than previously recognized. However, even amidst the gathering attention directed toward these figures and their cultural context, it is the most basic and obvious feature of Lanfranc's and Anselm's written record that has been the most undeservedly neglected: their use of dialogue and its correlation to the early development of Scholastic disputation. To be sure, the revival of dialectic in the eleventh century and especially in the twelfth has long been known and rather well charted, particularly with regard to the growth of theology as an academic discipline. What follows is a somewhat more focused line of inquiry. Looking beyond the well-trodden ground of Anselm's philosophy and theology and instead examining his pedagogical innovations, this essay explores Anselm's contribution to the development of literary dialogue and to the origins of the Scholastic disputatio, both valuable tools indeed in his philosophical and theological endeavors. Anselm's influence as a prolific author of dialogues can especially be observed in a younger generation of writers and thinkers who studied with him or directly sought to imitate his style and whose oeuvres need also to be considered. By examining the circle of Lanfranc and Anselm, the methods embodied by their teachings, and the writings they produced, this essay aims to show that the Scholastic dialectical methods, later so prominent in medieval universities, have their origins within the general milieu of monastic learning. More specifically, these methods will be shown to have their origins in Lanfranc's and Anselm's engagement with dialogue and disputation at the school of Bec. (shrink)

'This sentence is false' - is that true? The 'Liar paradox' embodied in those words exerted a particular fascination on the logicians of the Western later Middle Ages, and, along with similar 'insoluble' problems, forms the subject of the first group of articles in this volume. In the following parts Professor Spade turns to medieval semantic theory, views on the relationship between language and thought, and to a study of one particular genre of disputation, that known as 'obligationes'. The focus (...) is on the Oxford scholastics of the first half of the 14th century, and it is the name of William of Ockham which dominates these pages - a thinker with whom Professor Spade finds himself in considerable philosophical sympathy, and whose work on logic and semantic theory has a depth and richness that have not always been sufficiently appreciated. (shrink)

Roger Ariew begins this book with the following sensible claim: “A philosophical system cannot be studied adequately apart from the intellectual context in which it is situated”. His book, naturally enough, attempts to demonstrate the way in which Descartes responded to and affected the philosophical world of late Scholasticism. The ten chapters themselves are all previously, or soon to be, published essays, unified by the view that our knowledge of late Scholasticism is deeply imperfect and that our resulting (...) picture of Descartes is also imperfect. Each chapter provides an example of how, with a proper understanding of Scholastic philosophy, we arrive at a slightly different and more refined picture of Descartes. Indeed, Ariew’s work is the product of an admirably broad and detailed knowledge of the works of the major thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Toletus, Suarez, Eustachius, Basso, Clavius, Dupleix, Mersenne, Arnauld, and many others are the actors in this drama of the rise of Cartesianism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century by Bonnie KentTimothy B. NooneBonnie Kent. Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Pp. viii + 270. Cloth, $44.95.In this admirably written study, Bonnie Kent presents researchers on medieval philosophy with a survey of moral psychology during the (...) crucial period between the death of Thomas Aquinas and the summit of Duns Scotus’s career in the first decade of the fourteenth century. Although there have been many studies of particular issues in particular thinkers during this period and a generous presentation of texts with commentary by the great Dom Lottin (Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, 7 vols. Louvain, 1942–1954), there has not been any lengthy study to date devoted to the period of the late thirteenth century that focused on moral psychology and the will. Simply in drawing attention to this period in the history of moral psychology, Professor Kent has made a tremendous contribution to the study of medieval philosophy, since she has rendered accessible authors that are more often than not neglected and overlooked. Kent, in fact, attempts something more: she places her study in the framework of the general historiography of Scholastic thought and the more recent interest in medieval ethics prompted by those championing virtue ethics.In order to highlight the distinguishing features of recent studies on medieval ethical thought, Kent reviews the established interpretation of philosophy in the thirteenth century. In the opening chapter, entitled “Heroes and Histories,” she points out the features common to the scholarly approaches of Gilson, Van Steenberghen, and even Copleston: (1) a prominent role is assigned to schools and movements, especially Aristotelianism and Augustinianism; (2) metaphysics and epistemology are the primary objects of study along with the relation between philosophy and theology; and (3) the Thomistic point of view is the organizing principle for telling the drama of the period. The last feature means that the history of the period is fundamentally told as streams of influence leading to Aquinas, followed by the golden age of Aquinas and his contemporaries and succeeded by a gradual decline after Aquinas, leading to the demise of Scholastic thought. In the context of the established historiography, accordingly, the approach of Alasdair MacIntyre represents a restatement of the common view, but one more radical in form. Instead of being merely different schools or movements, Augustinianism and Aristotelianism are different worldviews with their own paradigmatic conceptions of rationality, each of which is subsumed into the higher synthesis of Thomism. According to MacIntyre, the passage to modernity is begun by Scotus whose innovative theses in moral psychology and ethics are considered revolutionary.Kent’s stated aim is to challenge the “standard story” found in Gilson and others as well as its revised version in MacIntyre’s writings by providing a detailed study of the [End Page 462] period just prior to Scotus and establishing precisely how revolutionary Scotus’s teachings were when compared to his immediate predecessors. She accomplishes this aim masterfully in a series of chapters dedicated to the sources of medieval thought and elements of moral psychology. Beginning with late thirteenth-century thinkers’ attitude toward Aristotle in her second chapter, she shows in considerable detail that there is little evidence for any serious anti-Aristotelianism in the vast majority of late thirteenth-century authors. Indeed, the posture of these thinkers was to separate Aristotle from radical Aristotelianism and Thomism in order to claim that ancient wisdom was on the side of Christian ethics and psychology. The only exception that Kent finds to this widespread attitude is in the writings of Peter John Olivi whose hostility to pagan philosophy is clearly evident.The focus in the next chapter is on ethical voluntarism, a position characterized by the endorsement of the superiority of will over reason, the claim that human freedom resides primarily in the faculty of the will, that the will can act contrary to reason’s judgment, and that the will, not the intellect, commands the lower powers of the soul. In detailing the advent of... (shrink)

The present essay considers the doctrine of the analogia entis that the late Baroque Scholastic thinker Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza develops. Central to Hurtado’s account is the notion of transcendence that he appropriates from Francisco Suárez’s transcendental explication of being. Being’s immanent containment within its own differences marked an important feature of Suárez’s own teaching, but his was a teaching with which Hurtado was left fundamentally unsatisfied. For Hurtado, being’s immanent transcendence makes it at once identical with itself (...) but also, paradoxically, diverse from itself. Still, though he finds reason to maintain that the common concept of being is in fact analogical, there remain concepts that, as Hurtado sees it, are truly univocal with respect to substance and accidents as well as God and creatures. Hurtado stands on the cusp, as it were, of the transition from the Jesuit Scholastic preference for analogy to the eventual wide-spread adoption of univocity. (shrink)

The late scholastic era was, among others, contemporary to the “emergence of probability”, the German academic philosophy from Leibniz to Kant, and the introduction of Newtonian physics. Within this era, two branches of the late-scholastic analysis of induction can be identified, one which can be thought of as a continual development of earlier scholastic approaches, while the other one absorbed influences of early modern philosophy, mathematics, and physics. Both branches of scholastic philosophy share the (...) terminology of modalities, probability, and forms of arguments. Furthermore, induction was commonly considered valid as a result of being a covert syllogism. Last but not least, there appears to be a difference in emphasis between the two traditions’ analyses of induction: while Tolomei discussed the theological presuppositions of induction, Amort’s “leges contingentium” exemplify the principles of induction by aleatory phenomena and Boscovich’s rules for inductive arguments are predominately concerned with the generalisation of macro-level observations to the micro-level. (shrink)

Abstract:The career of Gervase of Tilbury (c.1150–1220) opens a window into the complexity of the late twelfth-century intellectual world. Often dismissed as a mere compiler, Gervase was a scholastic thinker outside the schools who adapted complex theological arguments for an English prince, a Sicilian king, and a German emperor. His writing reveals the "portability" of scholastic thought. It also demonstrates how scholastic authors were molded by their experiences of royal courts. Gervase's time in the Norman Sicilian (...) kingdom shaped his attitude to political authority and his experience of royal hospitality allowed him to fashion a distinctive view of heavenly beatitude. (shrink)

In The Foundations of Private Law James Gordley argues that the modern private law in common and civil law jurisdictions is best explained on the basis of a neo-Aristotelian theory first developed by a group of 16th century Spanish thinkers known as the ‘late scholastics’. The concepts of distributive and commutative justice that, according to Gordley, lay at core of the scholastics’ theory and that explain, respectively, modern property law and the law of obligations , though ignored and (...) disparaged for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, are today familiar to most private law scholars . Yet Gordley’s understanding of these concepts and, in particular, of their relationship both to one another and to the apex idea of ‘living a distinctively human life’ is unique, setting his account apart not just from utilitarian and other ‘modern’ accounts of private law, but also from other neo-Aristotelian theories . In Gordley’s presentation, commutative justice is derived from distributive justice and distributive justice is derived from the idea of the distinctively human life. Confidently traversing a wide range of historical, comparative and theoretical materials, the book’s argument is at once ambitious, learned, and elegantly presented. But as a theoretical account of the foundations of the modern private law it is unpersuasive. The book’s own account of property law suggests that in practice the idea of distributive justice does little, if any, work in explaining the rules we actually have. Nor is it clear how, if at all, distributive justice flows from the allegedly foundational idea of the ‘distinctively human life’. As for commutative justice, it is not clear why, if is derived from distributive justice in the way Gordley believes, the courts should care about it. Finally, but perhaps most significantly, Gordley’s conception of commutative justice is unable to account for central features of the law of obligations. (shrink)

Scholastic hylomorphism conceives prime matter and substantial form as metaphysical parts of every physical substance. During the early modern period, both hylomorphic constituents faced significant criticism as scientists and philosophers sought to replace Aristotelianism with physical explanations for the workings of the universe. This paper focuses specifically on prime matter and delves into the arguments put forth by four 16th-century scholastic philosophers – Toledo, Fonseca, Góis, and Suárez – in their attempts to establish the existence of prime matter. (...) Firstly, I analyse a set of arguments rooted in substantial change, which emphasize the crucial role of a persistent, common substrate in the processes of generation and corruption. Secondly, I explore a set of ex-nihilo arguments and, thirdly, I examine a series of demonstrations based on the interplay between accidental and substantial change. Although these three sets of arguments converge on the necessity of a common substrate for substantial change to occur, they fall short of demonstrating that this substrate is both prime and shared by all natural entities. Fourthly, I turn to a set of arguments centred on the impossibility of infinite regress, designed to complement those related to natural change, and I assess additional arguments that do not primarily focus on substantial change. Lastly, I draw my conclusions on these argumentative strategies to demonstrate the existence of prime matter. (shrink)

Although Descartes is often said to have coined the modern notion of 'consciousness', he nowhere defines the according Latin term (conscientia), neither explicitly nor implicitly. This may either imply that he used the word in a sense that he did not make sufficiently clear, that he was not the first to use 'conscientia' in its modern psychological sense, or that he still used it in its traditional sense. I argue for the third assumption: Descartes used 'conscientia' according to the traditional (...) meaning that we also find in the writings of St. Paul, Augustine, Aquinas and later scholastics. Thus for Descartes, conscientia is not a kind of speculative self-knowledge, inner observation or reflexive awareness. Rather, it is a kind of practical knowledge. This is a bold claim. I will argue for it (1) by closely examining the key passages in the Cartesian writings and (2) by re-evaluating the traditional use of the Latin 'conscientia'. Then I will (3) draw some consequences. 1. Descartes makes rather clear what consciousness (conscientia) is not. To take only the most likely candidates. Consciousness is not a thought (cogitatio), since every thought must be accompanied by consciousness. Further, it is not a disposition. Descartes claims that the object of our consciousness never is a possible, but always must be an actual thought. It would be difficult to see how a disposition could be about an actual thought rather than a possible one. But consciousness is also not an attribute of a thought, since Descartes always ascribes it to the thinker herself. 2. In classical and mediaeval Latin, 'conscientia' did not mean 'consciousness', but also not exactly the same as 'moral conscience'. Three aspects are involved in the traditional meaning of the term. First, conscientia is shared knowledge. At least since Augustine, this knowledge is said to be shared between particular human agents and God. Second, conscientia concerns the specific (moral) value of an action. Even more, as Aquinas maintains, actions acquire their rationality and normativity only by being subject to conscientia. On this basis, later scholastics thirdly defined conscientia as a kind of practical knowledge. As such, conscientia is in some sense the cause of what it understands. Put in late scholastic terms, it is the formal cause of its moral being (esse morale). This account of the meaning of 'conscientia' will be shown to be largely compatible with the Cartesian use of the term; the only change to be made being that it deals with thoughts (cogitationes) and their specific value rather than with actions. Hence for Descartes, consciousness is a kind of practical knowledge about thoughts that is shared with an ideal observer (God) and that causes the specific value of the thought that is its object. 3. This reading has several important implications. For instance, it provides us with a reason for the claim that the consciousness is not itself a thought of the thinker who has it. Our the consciousness turns something into a thought by taking it as its object and thereby endowing it with the specific value that it has as a thought. This value might be truth, correctness, adequacy or something along these lines. Now every particular judgment of value can itself be false, incorrect, or inadequate. Hence, every particular reflexive thought would itself be subject to a further consciousness. The only conscientia that can stop this regress is Gods knowledge of our thoughts. This knowledge cannot be wrong. As a consequence, the suggested reading directs us away from the assumption that the mind contains only incorporeal thoughts that are privately known to the thinker. As for the first, Descartes himself claims that most of our thoughts depend on the body. The object of our consciousness may then be some event happening in our brain. Consciousness turns this event into something that is also in some respect incorporeal by endowing it with a value. As thought, it is then not a mere corporeal thing. (The modern reader may add: as thought, but not as bodily event, it is equivalent with other brain events.) As for the second part of the above claim, the Cartesian mind must be radically public, since we always share our conscientia with an ideal observer. Finally, we come to see why Descartes proceeds so easily from his cogito, sum to a proof of the existence of God. Since every thought must be subject to a conscientia, there must always have been an ideal observer. God's existence can be shown because it must already have been presupposed. In fact, the Cartesian meditator was never alone. (shrink)

Aristotle divided arguments that persuade into the rhetorical (which happen to persuade), the dialectical (which are strong so ought to persuade to some degree) and the demonstrative (which must persuade if rightly understood). Dialectical arguments were long neglected, partly because Aristotle did not write a book about them. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth century late scholastic authors such as Medina, Cano and Soto developed a sound theory of probable arguments, those that have logical and not merely psychological (...) force but fall short of demonstration. Informed by late medieval treatments of the law of evidence and problems in moral theology and aleatory contracts, they considered the reasons that could render legal, moral, theological, commercial and historical arguments strong though not demonstrative. At the same time, demonstrative arguments became better understood as Galileo and other figures of the Scientific Revolution used mathematical proof in arguments in physics. Galileo moved both dialectical and demonstrative arguments into mathematical territory. (shrink)

Introduction Conatus is a specific concept within Descartes’s physics. In particular, it assumes a crucial importance in the purely mechanistic description of the nature of light – an issue that Des- cartes considered one of the most crucial challenges, and major achievements, of his natural phil- osophy. According to Descartes’s cosmology, the universe – understood as a material continuum in which there is no vacuum – is composed of a number of separate yet interconnected vortices. Each of these vortices consists (...) in a set of bands rotating around their centres. The bands are com- posed of corpuscles of the three elements, each distinguished on the basis of their different shapes and sizes. The small globules of the second element, although impeded by the other parts of heaven, strive to move away from the centre of the vortex around which they revolve, thus exerting a certain force against the surrounding bodies. This striving or conatus, though a mere force rather than a genuine motion, is transmitted instan- taneously and along straight lines from body to body. According to Descartes, then, the nature of light consists in this striving alone. This account must be understood as strictly connected to the fundamental laws that regulate the Cartesian world. It is particularly important to recall that for Descartes the centrifugal force exerted by a rotating body is understood to be a consequence of the intrinsic rectilinearity of every motion. As the second of the three Laws of Nature set forth in Book II of the Principles of Philosophy establishes, “all motion is in itself rectilinear; and hence any body moving in a circle tends to move away from the centre of the circle which it describes as proved by the fact that a stone rotating in a sling tends to move centrifugally along the tangent of each point described by a circle.1 Similarly, each of the globules of the second element “strives to recede with a great force from the centre of the vortex in which it rotates; it is in fact prevented by the other globules placed all around, not differently than a stone in a sling”. Within this framework, as I show later, conatus occurs when a body’s intrinsic tendency to rectilinear motion is impeded by an external constraint. As Stephen Gaukroger notes, the use of the term conatus in the Principles – like “vis” and “ action ” – shows that Descartes “cannot avoid dynamic terminology”, despite his declared intent “to construe motion in a purely kinematic way”. Indeed, Gaukroger observes that the notions of force action and striving are systematically employed in the Principles – appearing 290, 59 and 8 times, respectively. Also noteworthy, conatus was – together with the more familiar concepts of actio and vis – a significant element of the conceptual apparatus of Scholastic natural philosophy. As will be seen later – and this is the first goal of this paper – here the concept of conatus had a very specific function. Indeed, it was a central part of the Aristotelian- Scholastic account of gravitation. Conatus was used to refer to the striving of a body to move towards its natural place – especially in cases where its natural motion was hindered or impeded by an external mover. This specific use of the concept of conatus can be found in texts on natural philosophy from the end of the sixteenth through the late seventeenth century. Notably, it occurs in some of the late -Scho- lastic texts which held special significance for Descartes’s thought. Therefore, Descartes introduces conatus in a context in which this concept already had a very specific meaning, and one of which he was very probably aware. The possible relations between these two apparently very different con- cepts have therefore to be scrutinized. I thereby propose to undertake a comparison between the Scho- lastic and the Cartesian conceptions of conatus. I hope to show that certain traits of the former are indeed echoed by the latter, although adapted to the much changed physical paradigm of Cartesian physics. In fact, Descartes’s conatus, though sharing some important similarities with the old one, underwent significant transformations in terms of both its meaning and its application. However, I hope to show that these concepts are both used to describe the behaviour of bodies in relation to their intrinsic motive tendency, and in particular when this tendency is impeded or prevented. Such a reconstruction offers two main areas of interest. On an immediate level, it furthers the general efforts of scholars over the past decades to reconstruct the full extent of the relations between Descartes’s thought and Scholastic philosophy. However, there is another significant reason for taking an interest in the ties between the Scholastic and the Cartesian conceptions of conatus. Indeed, the Cartesian conatus must be seen as crucial to a proper understanding of the broader, diverse conceptualization that this idea enjoyed in the thought of many of the most important philosophers of the early modern period, namely Spinoza, Hobbes and Leibniz. In particular, Spinoza, were directly influenced by Descartes in their unique formulations of conatus. Thus a reconstruction of the context in which Descartes formulated his conatus and of its relations to a pre-existing Scholastic conception will enable us to better reconstruct the history of this idea in the early modern period. The paper is structured as follows: in the first part, I provide a thorough review of the Scho- lastic employment of the concept conatus – both its meaning and the extent of its usage. I then show that it occurs in some of the most prominent Cartesian sources. Finally, I shall provide an account of Descartes’s theory of circular motion and conatus with the specific aim of empha- sizing the elements of both continuity and discontinuity that justify the claim that Descartes’s con- ception of conatus is reminiscent of the Scholastic one. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE BARTH LEGACY: NEW ATHANASIUS OR ORIGEN REDIVIVUS? :A RESPONSE TO T. F. TORRANCE RICHARD A. MULLER Fuller Theological Semma1·y Pasadena, California I I N A SERIES of papers, essays, and introductions reaching back some twenty years, T. F. Torrance has provided an interpretation of the place arnd of the importance of Karl Barth not only in the theological debates of the twentieth cent- -bury but also and more (...) importantly in the who1e of the history of doctrine. According to Torrance, Barth is not only the greatest theologian since Schleiermacher and the most important thinker of our own times, he is also the greatest theologian since Athanasius, the heir of the Reformers, and the thinker on whose insights our theological future must rest.1 In these essays by Torrance, the characterization of Barthian thought as "neo1 Cf. Karl Barth, Theology and Church: Shorter Writings, 1920-1928, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith, with an introduction (1962) by T. F. Torrance (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 7, 9-10; T. F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction (London: SCJ'vf, 1965), pp. 99, 103-105, 111-115; idem, ReaUty and Evangelical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982),,pp. 14-15; idem, Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), pp. vii-x, 279-283; idem, "The Legacy of Karl Barth (1886· 1986)," in Scottish Journal of Theology, 39 (1986): 289-308 and "Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy," in 39 (1986): 461-482. The latter two essays draw together themes from the earlier words..Although the term "Latin heresy" does not seem to have been used by Torrance in any of his previous writings, it does represent a continuation of the attack on medieval and postReformation theology :first presented in his introduction to The School of Faith: The Oatechisms of the Reformed Ohi1rch (N.Y.: Harper, 1959), pp. lxx-lxxix, and elaborated in Space, Time and IncM'nation (London: Oxford, 1969). 673 674 RICHARD A, MULLER orthodox" takes on a new meaning. Barth himself rejected the term, just as (we might guess) Calvin or Chemnitz would have!'ejected any claim that their great dogmatic projects were the proper basis for a new orthodoxy in the sixteenth century. Both Calvin and Chemnitz stood for right teaching, for ortho-doxy, but neither would have presented their own views-no matter how correct they believed their exegesis and interpretation to be-as a final ground for the establishment of future theological formulations. Both in the Reformation aind in the twentieth century, it has been the next generation, the generation of the students of the great teaicher, that has moved definitely from the system of the teaicher to the establishment of a new orthodoxy. And in all fairness to the Protestant orthodox of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we must l'ecognize that they neither exalted the theology of the Reformation to the status of a new orthodoxy (ovcer against the faith of the church throughout the centuries) nor identified any single theological system, whether that of Calvin or that of Chemnitz or of a later, more fully "orthodox" and "scholastic" thinker like Polanus or Gerhard, as an exhaustive statement of theological Ol1thodoxy for the chmch.2 In the writings of Torrance, we encounter this second-generation sense of orthodoxy but, I believe, without the caution characteristic of the Protestant orthodox of the seventeenth century. In the following essay, I propose to examine the origin and the subsequent trajectory of Torrance's views on Barth's relationship to the tradition, with attention to his view of Barth's patristic roots and of Barth's position over against the western theological mind. In the concluding sections of the essay, I will try to provide a corrective to Torrance's approach to the history of 1Christian doctrine and, on the basis of that correc-. tive, an alternative view of the lega1cy of Karl Barth. Torrance's pronouncements concerning the role of Barth in 2 Cf. Richard A. Muller, " Scholasticism Protestant and Catholic: Francis Turretin on the Object and Principles of Theology," in Ohuroh Historv, 55 ( 1986) ; 19::!-205, THE BARTH LEGACY 675 the history of Christian doctrine and, therefore, in its future development a11e based on an... (shrink)

The Sourcebook is a thematically unified collection of seminal texts in the history of economics on the topic of money and exchange relations —its nature, purpose, value, and relationship to justice and morality in financial transactions—within the tradition of late-scholastic commercial ethics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Medieval Heritage in Early Modern Metaphysics and Modal Theory, 1400–1700Jean-Pascal AnfrayRussell L. Friedman and Lauge O. Nielsen, editors. The Medieval Heritage in Early Modern Metaphysics and Modal Theory, 1400–1700. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003. Pp. vi + 346. Cloth, $149.00.This volume contains contributions that aim to show the continuity between late medieval thought and early modern philosophy, or, as the editors say, to investigate "the way that medieval (...) thought served as a fertile basis for developments in the early modern period" (3). As the title indicates, most papers treat topics more or less connected to modalities, either from a logical or from an ontological point of view. The nature of modalities is indeed at the core of metaphysics and philosophical theology. Ludger Honnefelder, Joël Biard, and Fabrizio Mondori all show the influence of Duns Scotus on the setting of modern metaphysics. The importance of theological matters in the development of philosophical thought has been acknowledged for a long time. Thus Chris Schabel ("Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom: Auriol, Pomponazzi, and Luther on 'Scholastic Subtleties'") sketches the story of the controversy over God's foreknowledge and future contingents from its setting in the early fourteenth century to Lutheran Reformation. He stresses the underestimated influence of Peter Auriol in this continuing debate. Still, revealed theology too exercised influence on the philosophy of logic. Trinity constitutes an until now little studied case, which is the subject matter of Simo Knuuttila's contribution ("The Question of the Validity of Logic in Late Medieval Thought"). He partly rehearses some of his well-known theses about the source of logical truths and modalities and analyses the constructivist aspects of Descartes's position, in so far as the laws of logic are said to depend on God's will. But the most original part of the study bears on the effects of Trinitarian constraints within the field of logic, especially in syllogistics. Medieval thinkers had to cope with syllogisms like: "The divine essence is the father; the divine essence is the Son; therefore the Son is the Father." In order to avoid the absurdity of the conclusion, many answers were elaborated: Robert Holcot removed the Trinity from the domain of validity of syllogistics, thereby relativizing it. Luther's claim that the principles of theology contradict those of logic looks like a radical version of this position. Adam Wodeham maintained contrariwise the universality of syllogistics: he held that the premisses are not syllogistic if they are interpreted as true (130). His account is based on the identity theory of predication and on the distinction between intensional and extensional identity, which both date back to Abelard.In the period covered by the volume, early modern scholastic, chiefly the Jesuit scholastic, holds a central place. Two articles insist on its originality and intrinsic value. Jeffrey Coombs ("The Ontological Source of Logical Possibility in Catholic Second Scholasticism") [End Page 208] analyzes the various metaphysics of modalities. He claims that three theories of the source of logical modalities were entertained during the early seventeenth century, which he labels respectively "transcendentalism," "modal voluntarism," and "divine conceptualism." All of these positions can be traced back to medieval theories; however, they received an extensive treatment in late scholastic thought. Coombs is especially illuminating when he emphasizes the importance of the grounding metaphysical structure: essences and their systematic relations through "Porphyrian trees." This generated two different accounts of the ontological status of essences: according to essentialist theories, complete Porphyrian trees are the basis of necessity and possibility, while according to a "string theories," only the logical connections between the components of the essential structure are available eternally (196).Yet the most striking novelty of the time lies in the systematization of a statistical interpretation of modalities through the "moral modalities," originating in post-Tridentine Catholic theology. In contrast to Hacking's thesis (see The Taming of Chance [Cambridge, 1990]), Sven Knebel ("The Renaissance of Statistical Modalities in Early Modern Scholasticism") contends that the concept of aleatory probability was first developed within this context. That an event-type Q is morally necessary means that Q is always the case, and that not-Q actually is never the case (236... (shrink)

This paper examines the views of a number of late scholastic moral theologians, with emphasis on Francisco Suárez, about the limits of the duty to refrain from those otherwise permissible actions which make it difficult for people to choose uprightly. In so doing, the paper singles out and analyses a number circumstantial factors capable of excusing ordinary agents for giving others an occasion of sin.

This paper investigates the reason why, in the tradition of Western philosophy, a logic of relations was developed only in the second half of the nineteenth century. To this end, it moves along two different but interconnected paths: on the one hand, it attempts to reconstruct the main views concerning the ontology of relations during the middle ages; on the other, it focuses on the treatment of so-called oblique terms in the logical works of some preeminent authors belonging to the (...) scholastic and late-scholastic tradition. From the ontological point of view, realists and nominalist both denied that polyadic expressions of the language signify polyadic properties in the world extra. Some authors, such as Peter Auriol, claimed that polyadic expressions signify something merely mental, thus recognizing, even though in a limited ontological domain, the existence of full-fledged relations, that is, of ‘things’ simultaneousl... (shrink)

In the period of emergence of early modern science, ‘monsters’ or individuals with physical congenital anomalies were considered as rare events which required special explanations entailing assumptions about the laws of nature. This concern with monsters was shared by representatives of the new science and Late Scholastic authors of university textbooks. This paper will reconstruct the main theses of the treatment of monsters in Late Scholastic textbooks, by focusing on the question as to how their accounts (...) conceived nature’s regularity and teleology. It shows that they developed a naturalistic teratology in which, in contrast to the naturalistic explanations usually offered by the new science, finality was at central stage. This general point does not impede our noticing that some authors were closer to the views emerging in the Scientific Revolution insofar as they conceived nature as relatively autonomous from God and gave a relevant place to efficient secondary causation. In this connection, this paper suggests that the concept of the laws of nature developed by the new science –as exception-less regularities—transferred to nature’s regularity the ‘strong’ character that Late Scholasticism attributed to finality and that the decline of the Late Scholastic view of finality played as an important concomitant factor permitting the transformation of the concept of laws of nature. (shrink)

After reconstructing some features of the Scholastic treatment of contingency in natural philosophy, this paper draws a comparison between Descartes’ treatments of the issue of the laws of nature in Le Monde and in the Principles of Philosophy. On the basis of this comparison, it argues that elements of the Scholastic understanding of contingency as due to the impediment provided by matter are still present in the former. While in the Principles Descartes appears to equate contingency with an (...) epistemological limitation in our understanding of the complexity of natural phenomena, in conclusion I argue that some elements of his previous approach to the issue remains in his treatment of curvilinear motion. (shrink)

This paper is a review of 'Faith and Liberty. The Economic Thought of the Late Scholastics' by Alejandro A. Chafuen.

What does Descartes's embryology look, if related to the Scholastic theories of his time? In order to reply to this question, the present chapter aims at sketching a portrait of the embryological epigenetics Descartes could find in his recognized Scholastic sources (the Commentaries on Aristotle by Toledo, the Coimbra Jesuits, Suárez, and Rubio, as well as the Summae by Eustachius a Sancto Paulo and Abra de Raçonis), a tradition that received and incorporated in the Aristotelian-Galenic body many novelties (...) from Renaissance medicine, especially Fernel, Paré, and Vallès. It being impossible to deal extensively with the whole of the contents of these works, I picked up three issues in particular, corresponding to the first three paragraphs of this paper: 1) the nature of the semen, and the action of the vis formativa, as well as its relationship with vital heat and temperaments; 2) the problem of the real and/or rational distinction(s) between the generative, the nutritive, and the augmentative powers; 3) the epigenetic order of generation of vital organs, i.e. the right sequence over which the fundamental organs of a living body are generated and then ensouled. In the last paragraph I integrate these reconstructions with some conclusions about Descartes' own theory. (shrink)

Clanak analizira razvoj istorijskofilozofskog istrazivanja kasnosholastickih izvora Dekartove teorije ideja. U prvom delu analizira se dugo vremena dominantan stav medju istoricarima filozofije da je Dekartova teorija ideja u biti epistemologija. Uzroci napustanja takve, umnogome novokantovstvom uslovljene slike bili su pojava nove generacije istoricara filozofije koja je istrazivala i nemetafizicke oblasti Dekartove misli, ali i rad na samoj kasnosholastickoj filozofiji. U drugom delu pokazuje se zasto je za Dekarta relevantna kasna sholastika, a ne, na primer, Toma Akvinski i zasto se od (...) kasnosholastickih mislilaca po znacaju posebno izdvaja Francisko Suarez. (shrink)